Bush didn't know anything about Maliki, but put him in charge of Iraq anyway - Vox

That's right!

Bush didn't know anything about Maliki, but put him in charge of Iraq anyway - Vox: "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has just lost the support of his party, and looks like he will soon be pushed out of office, barring a coup or wildly implausible political turnaround. Maliki's eight years in office have been a disaster for Iraq — his increasingly authoritarian rule and oppression of Iraq's Sunni minority bears no small amount of responsibility for the current Islamic State (ISIS) crisis, which is part of why the US and many others are pushing for him to go.

So maybe now's a good time to remember that the US put him in power in the first place.

An April 2014 piece in The New Yorker, by Dexter Filkins, lays the story out in all of its sordid details. In 2006, the Iraqi civil war seemed uncontrollable, and the Bush administration wanted incumbent Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari gone. "Can you get rid of Jaafari?", Bush asked US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. "Yes," Khalilzad said, "but it will be difficult.""

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